Pay-per-click (PPC) is a good way to utilize paid digital advertising while still tightly controlling the budget. For starters, you only get charged by publishers when visitors click on your ads. But the other side of that coin is having to bid on keywords for your ads. The most expensive keywords can get you into trouble if you are not paying attention.
The PPC bidding process is pretty simple in principle. Advertisers bid for the opportunity to have their ads displayed when certain keywords are searched. The higher the bid, the more likely a company’s ads will be given priority over similar ads from a competitor.
As for the most expensive keywords, they are the keywords that demand the highest in prices. They are often the most common keywords in a given industry. If you are going to bid on them as a PPC advertiser, make sure you also do these four things, too:
1. Protect Against PPC Ad Fraud
PPC ad fraud occurs when ads are clicked with no intention to actually visit the site and buy something. It can be perpetrated by human beings or bots. For the purposes of this post, your biggest concern is paying a ton of money for the most expensive keywords only to have that money flushed down the toilet by way of PPC ad fraud.
Your best protection against such fraud is a software package that looks for signs of fraud and alerts you to them. One such click fraud protection software is known as Fraud Blocker. It offers several particularly important features advertisers find useful.
2. Pay Attention to Analytics
Analytics are deployed in PPC advertising to tell advertisers how their campaigns are doing. You should have some analytics data points for measuring the value of the keywords you bid on. Pay attention to those analytics. They will tell you whether the most expensive keywords are truly aligned with your goals. If not, there is no point in spending so much money on them. Find some new keywords.
3. Conduct Routine Keyword Searches
This next point goes hand-in-hand with the previous one: conduct routine keyword searches. Do not just choose a selection of keywords for your ad campaigns and forget about them. Routine searches are necessary to identify alternative keywords you can use in the event your analytics reveal the current choices are not performing well.
Along these same lines, do not be afraid to utilize long-tail keywords in your PPC ad campaigns. Long-tail keywords don’t necessarily get searched as often, but they do produce website visitors who are more likely to buy. It is all about specificity.
Long-tail keywords make online searches more specific. People who use them know what they are looking for. With that mindset, they are also more likely to make a positive decision when they actually find it.
4. Make Conversion a Top Priority
PPC advertising is normally built around one of four possible goals: driving traffic, increasing exposure, increasing conversion rates, and maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS). If you are going to bid on the most expensive keywords, conversion should be your top priority. Make sure your ads and associated landing pages are designed to lead visitors to conversion.
The most expensive keywords can produce excellent PPC results. But there are no guarantees. They can also deplete an advertising budget without generating the desired results. Still, you should by no means avoid them. Go ahead and bid on them for PPC ad campaigns. Just make an effort to do the four things mentioned in this post as well. All are critical to your success.